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A coming World Wide Web of 3D virtual worlds

June 8th, 2007 by tim finin

The Economist’s current quarterly technology report has an interesting article discussing the evolution of MMOGs and virtual worlds.

Online gaming’s Netscape moment?

Video games: Existing virtual worlds are built on closed, proprietary platforms, like early online services. Might they now open up, like the web?

The premise of the article is that virtual world game engines like Multiverse are not only making it easier to create new worlds but will also allow characters and game entities to move from world to world. They liken his to the change that happened as the Internet moved from being a series of “walled gardens” based on proprietary online services like the well, AOL and Prodigy to the Web and its standard languages, protocols and middleware.

“As with the web, the hope is that the emergence of a single, open platform will encourage wider adoption and new uses of the technology. Before the web, companies that wished to establish an online presence had to do so on proprietary platforms. The same is true today. Lots of companies are setting up shop in Second Life, but some might prefer to have their own worlds, not just islands in someone else’s world, just as they have their own websites. Multiverse says that companies are starting to create worlds for training simulations, business collaboration, and modelling disasters.”

Multiverse Networks was, in fact, founded by a team of people from Netscape. Their business model is to make the software freely available and take 10% of the revenue stream if and when the virtual world has one.

Multiverse’s unique technology platform will change the economics of virtual world development by empowering independent game developers to create high-quality, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and non-game virtual worlds for less money and in less time than ever before. Multiverse solves the prohibitive challenges of game creation by providing developers with a comprehensive, pre-coded client-server infrastructure and tools, a wide range of free content–including a complete game for modification–and a built-in market of consumers. The Multiverse Network will give video game players a single program–the Multiverse Client–that lets them play all of the MMOGs and visit all of the non-game virtual worlds built on the Multiverse platform.

Has anyone out there at UMBC tried out their software?

Posted in MMOGs, social media, virtual worlds |

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